


Not with Corruptible Things, as Silver and Gold

by anti_ela



Series: Silver and Gold [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Voldemort, Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, James Potter Lives, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape Friendship, Lily Evans Potter Lives, POV Lily Evans Potter, Post-First War with Voldemort, The Prank, Unrequited Love, Werewolf Severus Snape, Writer Remus Lupin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-05-31 16:57:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19430203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anti_ela/pseuds/anti_ela
Summary: After Lily Potter learns about The Prank, she approaches a man she hasn't seen in years.





	1. Waxing Gibbous

**Author's Note:**

> In this AU, the Potters were still targeted; Snape was still the one who set the target on them. Snape's and Dumbledore's efforts in the first war were enough, though, and Voldemort died permanently.
> 
> This is the prologue.
> 
> To quote my friend Kate, Lily is the ghost of Harry Potter. Her friendship with Severus is the ghoul that lives in the attic; her relationship with Petunia is the body beneath the floorboards. 
> 
> Lily is charming, kindhearted, beautiful, and popular. She was also best friends with a "greasy little oddball" who was obsessed with the Dark Arts. She defended and protected this weirdo socially and bodily until he, after a severe bullying event which she mostly did not witness,* aligned himself with the rhetoric of people who wanted to kill people like her.
> 
> (*That said, nobody uses slurs in anger unless they at least think them regularly.)
> 
> Later, believing he had changed, she married James, who once sexually assaulted her ex-friend. She exchanged friendly letters with Sirius, who once tried to kill her ex-friend for fun, which she never knew about.
> 
> Clearly, she has a great capacity for forgiveness, a willingness to overlook flaws, and a deep reserve of love.
> 
> The first time the future Dursleys met with the future Potters, James mocked Vernon** so thoroughly that the Dursleys left. Lily wept. Petunia cut her sister out. Lily died still wanting to reunite with her sister. Not because Petunia deserved it, but because Lily believed in the best of people, because Lily held onto love.
> 
> (**Who should be mocked at every opportunity.)
> 
> We know so little about Lily. Inevitably, my version of her is different from yours; hell, my version of Harry is different from yours. 
> 
> All of this is to say: "Lily is a bitch" is not a comment I want to read once, much less the three times I've deleted it.

A decade past her Hogwarts days, Lily Potter looked into the face of the Bloody Baron. As he had always done, the gaunt ghost stared through her.

“Good evening, sir,” she said quietly. “Could you please escort me to Severus Snape?”

The Baron inclined his head and drifted through the dungeons, a half-step before her. Nothing about Hogwarts seemed to have changed, although after a thousand years, she supposed little adjustment could be needed. The torches, the stones, the windows to the lake--all that she lacked was a short, sallow-skinned boy tugging at her sleeve.

At a dark wooden door, the Baron paused. For a moment, it seemed as if he might say something, but then he bowed shallowly and left. She knocked, shivering at the sound of his chains scraping against the floor.

After a moment, the door swung open, and Lily found she had to look up to face Severus for the first time in her life. His skin was pale with dark shadows under his eyes; his black hair was pulled back, with silver at the temples. She glanced at his neck, but his high collar covered all. For a moment, his eyes widened and his lips parted, but his face relaxed into blankness as he stepped away from her.

“Mrs. Potter,” he said coolly, “I am in the middle of a delicate brew. Is it urgent?”

She considered him and then said carefully, “It's not time-sensitive. However, if you think it would not interfere with your work, I would appreciate...” She trailed off, fighting the urge to shrug. “You know yourself best, Severus.”

The corner of his mouth quirked. “Diplomatic as ever. Can I assume you've been worrying over this for months?”

She felt her back relax. “Am I so obvious?”

He raised an eyebrow, whirled, and strode to the center of the small potions lab. Following, she watched the straight line of his spine, the slow swing of his hair, and thought about the stilted, awkward boy he’d been. So unconscious of the world, once.

With the ease of long practice, he pulled a dragon-hide apron over his frock coat, pulled his hair through the neck loop where it had caught, and tied the apron strings behind his back. She knew, without looking, that the bow would be perfect. “It is genuinely difficult, although I have nearly finished tonight’s dose. Stay at least a meter back; if I ask you to be silent, listen.”

As he pulled on his gloves, she reviewed the ingredients. “Wolfsbane?”

His hands stilled. “Yes,” he said, tugging on the second glove. “One of the castle inhabitants requires it.”

“I thought you taught Defense?”

Severus sneered as he removed the stasis charm from the potion and began to stir widdershins. “As if I would allow that dunderhead they hired to make anything more complex than boil cure.” He looked up at her from beneath his brow. “Surely you didn't come to discuss my career?”

Lily watched as he slowly added a level scoop of powdered belladonna; as it dissolved, the surface shimmered. “I have questions about two things. One from fifth year, one from the war.”

He did not look up from the cauldron. “Not particularly revealing on either count.”

“Sirius let something slip… That he sent you to Remus.”

His hand twitched as he reached for the next ingredient, but he added the dried asphodel petal by petal. “Yes,” he said softly.

“When you were first turned, you tried to tell me they had done something,” Lily said.

“When I was first turned,” Severus started, then pressed his lips together. “If you doubted me, I'm sure you had reason.”

"I'm not perfect, and I definitely wasn't at fifteen."

He frowned at the potion. "Did it ever occur to you that I wouldn't want to talk about becoming a monster?"

She blinked. "Werewolves aren't monsters."

"Assuredly," he sneered. "Lupin is a lapdog, and Potter is a saint. I should be grateful, I..." He snapped his mouth shut.

She stepped closer. “You still hate them, then. What made you change your mind?”

He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Move back, please.”

His voice was so much lower now, a rumbling bass.

She moved back.

"You can't just..." Then he shook his head. After a moment, he said slowly, “I am not like you, Lily. Ideals, causes, they seem like so much air.”

“Yet you spied for the Order.”

Severus did not reply. After turning off the heat, he kept stirring, adding a clockwise stir every so often until the color dulled to lead. He tipped the bottle of essence of aconite so that it emptied drop by drop.

“Was it to repay your life debt to James?”

Tendrils of blue smoke wafted up from the cauldron, curling around his neck, veiling his face. “No, I still owe it.”

She blinked. “How could you work for two years and still…”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes!”

He ladled the potion into a goblet, smiled bitterly, and drank it down. “The Dark Lord has been dead for seven years; I have been a werewolf for thirteen. Why should any of it bother you now?”

“I need to understand,” she said.

He sighed, repacked the ingredients, vanished the rest of the mess, removed his gloves. After he untied his apron, removed it, and hung it on a hook, he met her gaze. “Regulus Black disappeared, and I was afraid. I tried to make myself necessary to my master and, in the process, did something unforgivable.” He shifted and looked away. “My spying was an attempt to undo it.”

She frowned. “Less forgivable than joining the Death Eaters? It was hardly a social club, Severus.”

His glittering black eyes snapped to hers. “Yes.”

Lily looked at his hands. "After I finished with Sirius, I cornered Remus. He said that James never stopped, when it came to you.”

Severus set the last ingredient in his brown leather bag, shut it, and locked it with a wordless spell. "If you want me to defend Potter," he drawled, "I'm afraid you will die unsatisfied."

"Did you think I knew?"

He picked up the bag and reviewed his work area. "I am sure that much of what I thought is not worth repeating. That child is gone." With the way he said 'child,' it should have been a curse. Seeming cool and unconcerned, he added, "Does he hurt you?"

With a jolt she remembered Mrs. Snape, quiet and fine-boned and always covered, even in summer. "No." She swallowed as two different James Potters filled the room. One was fifteen and terrible, spoiled and cruel; one was twenty-nine and generous, loving and brash. One was a tormentor, an enemy; one was a defender, a partner.

A tightness eased from his face. He nodded.

She pulled in a breath. "My first-born, Harry, will be at Hogwarts in a few years. He looks like his dad."

"Fascinating."

"Will you be--that is, will it bother you? Teaching him?"

"Mrs. Potter," he started, then stopped. He looked down at his hands, flexing them against the case, and a line formed between his eyebrows. He said slowly, "Lily. There is only one thing I require, and that need is met. I will never be a gentle or patient man, but I am content." He picked up the case and gestured her toward the door. A moment after she started walking, he followed. "I find that a great many things can be borne when one has simple needs."

Lily swallowed, aware that she was a Muggle-born witch with her back to an ex-Death-Eater, a werewolf the night before the full moon, a boy who had been her best friend. "All right." Once past the threshold, she turned to face him as nonchalantly as she could.

The lights of the lab were out, leaving him in shadow. His eyes glowed gold, reflecting the torches on the wall behind her. He blinked and looked down the corridor.

"Do you know the way out?"

"Yes," she said, certain she knew the shape of the maze.

He nodded and walked past her, turning left where she would turn right. The empty stone halls amplified the click of his heels so that she heard him long after he had left her sight.


	2. Full Moon

Lily stretched, yawning. Cecily had asked her usual thirty questions after their chapter; Harry had been possessed by his standard frantic nighttime energy. But finally, finally, they were asleep.

Thank goodness for Tabby. If only all her children exhausted themselves by running around and screaming all day. As far as Lily was concerned, every snore from Tabby's mouth was a blessing.

Cecily disagreed, but that's what silencing charms were for.

Lily dragged herself into the sitting room and folded herself onto the couch to wait. James would be home soon, and then they could talk, and then she could stop thinking…

She woke to a whiskery kiss. "Hey, Lil," James murmured. She blinked up at him, and he tousled her short hair. "What’s a sleepy gal like you doing on a couch like this?"

She hooked her foot behind his knee and pulled on his offending arm. Laughing, he fell beside her, his red Auror robes flapping. "We’ve discussed the hair," she said haughtily

"Yes, it’s very cute, especially when it’s messed up."

"Have you ever heard of Narcissus?"

He winked. "Some kind of flower, isn’t it?"

As she looked at him, she could feel her smile fade. He sat up straighter, black brows pushed together. "I need to talk to you," she said.

"Oh! That sounds…" He shook his head. "Yeah. Let’s do that. Love talking."

"It’s about Severus."

He leaned forward, hand on his wand. "What did he do."

"I see I’ve started this poorly," she said drily. "Nothing. I learned what happened to him, and I visited him to talk about it."

"Ah," he said, face blank. "You went for tea with Snape. Did you have a nice chat?"

Her eyebrows lifted until the skin around her eyes felt tight.   


"Right," he said, "that was quite shitty."

"Yes, it was."

After working his mouth for a few moments, he asked, "How is the old boy?"

"Fairly well for a werewolf. He can make his own Wolfsbane, of course, which probably helps. It looks like he’s not sleeping or eating enough, but what can you do."

"Oh," James said, blinking. "Right. Remus. He’s…" He cleared his throat. "So, er, did you want to… Why are we talking about Snape?"

"He was my friend once," Lily explained, "and I learned something about him and my husband from someone other than my husband."

"Yes, that does sound like a thing when you say it."

"James," she said, suddenly tired.

He swallowed, one hand snaking up to tug at his hair. "I know," he said quietly.

She tugged on the cuff of his sleeve, and he dropped his hand. "Please explain it to me."

"Well," he started, then frowned. "Snape was curious about our monthly outings, and Sirius--you know he doesn't think things through--Sirius thought it would be funny to, well, give him answers. I didn't know," he said earnestly. "I truly didn't know until he told me in the common room." James rocked back, chewing on his bottom lip. "I don't remember my flight or when exactly I transformed." He closed his eyes. "He kept screaming, I don't know how, his throat…"

He rubbed his neck and chest with a shaking hand.

"It was awful," he said hoarsely. "Moony… Moony likes to play with his food. I think the only reason Snape survived is because we, I don't know, we trained Moony to play…"

Lily asked softly, "And after?"

"Dumbledore kept it quiet, said we had to protect two lives with our silence, but… Sometimes, I wonder. We went so far, so often, and nothing ever happened, and then the moment we're all seventeen, he…" James shook his head. "I used to think it was because even Dumbledore hated Snape, but I wonder if he just didn't have a use for him. Four against one. Strategic."

Thinking of her dorm mates, all dead, Lily nodded. "So, unpunished, feeling sanctioned, the Marauders pressed on."

"Yes," James said.

"Who spread the tale of Severus's rescue?"

James squirmed. "Well, er, I did. Or I suppose Peter did, technically, but I asked him to. To impress you."

She gazed at him levelly.

"Fuck, I know."

"Severus Snape had a shit fifth year," she said, "and he had a shit sixth year, and a shit seventh year, and a shit time in the war as a spy for the Order, and he is currently having a shit time as a professor for Dumbledore, a man who apparently wrote off his life at fifteen years old! He is not my friend, but he used to be my brother, and… And I am never going to make his life worse or let anyone I know make his life worse."

James leaned forward. "He was a spy? Him?"

She scowled. "Not the important bit, James!"

"Sure, yeah, I won't bug him. What did he do? Do you know?"

"Of course I don't know! Why would he ever tell me?"

"Then what did he say when you visited?"

She rubbed her hands across her face. "He kept calling me Mrs. Potter. I think he hates me."

"Nah," James said, looking helplessly fond. "I don't think so."

"That isn't even everything. There's…"

He took her hands in his. "Please explain it to me."

"What I want you to understand is how it felt to me," she said. "I thought I lost all of my friends to the war, with Severus being the first. He rejected me for loathsome Mulciber and his blood purist friends; I rejected him for myself. As simple as breathing.

"Then we were recruited to a war in our teens, and my girlfriends died fighting it. When we went into hiding, my parents were killed. Voldemort was my enemy, but when I thought of the Death Eaters, I pictured Severus. Bruised, half-choked, spitting Mudblood at me. I thought of little Lord Malfoy, crooking his finger and Severus rushing to him. I thought of Mulciber and Avery, dangling Mary upside down, using Severus's spell."

As she thought, she stroked the back of James's hand. He kept silent: it was one of their signals.

She continued, "My sister and her vile husband were easy to leave behind. It was made easier by your reluctance to visit at all, by your behavior when we were with them, by the weeks of complaint after." She leaned her head against the couch. "I wanted my Tuney back, if I could have nothing else. My prodigal sister. But, for you, the lack of love is agony, and I wanted to spare you her jibes, her bitterness, made worse by grief. It was easy to choose you, James, so I did.

"And so it came to pass that my connections were all centered on you. Remus is my best friend; Andi Tonks is my closest girlfriend. My friends, my colleagues, even my neighbors knew and loved you first. Perhaps that's inevitable: I'm a little nobody from Cokeworth; you're a beloved scion from a noble House. But you like to introduce me as your wife, James."

She looked over at him. He was tugging at his hair again, his face clouded. She reached out, stilled his hand, pulled it into her lap.

"Muggles have something called marriage counseling. We're going." She squeezed his hands, looking into his hazel eyes. "I love you; I want to grow old and ugly with you. But things need to change."


	3. Waning Gibbous

Kreacher had left Lily in the kitchen, grumbling as he went about the duplicitous nature of Mudbloods. She ignored him. Sirius would likely sleep for hours yet, and until he woke the house-elf would insult her. Remus, though slow-moving after the full moon, attempted to keep to his normal schedule; he should stir soon.

When Sirius’s mother had died, he’d torn through Grimmauld Place, but still the house oozed darkness. Poor Kreacher mourned Mrs. Black and her defaced, silenced portrait four years on, but what Kreacher stole were Regulus’s photos, Regulus’s clothes, Regulus’s books. What was it like to raise a child who would never be yours? What was it like to lose him?

She had never met Regulus, but since speaking to Severus she couldn’t stop thinking of him. All Sirius ever said was that Regulus had been an idiot, biddable, gullible, killed by his own stupidity; but then Sirius would take up firewhisky and not set it down.

As she waited, Lily ran her fingers over her wand. Well-suited to Charms and healing, Ollivander had said. If severed from the tree, a willow branch can root and grow. It is a tree that is supposed to keep secrets and, if you’re lucky, answer questions.

She looked up as Remus lurched into the room. "Fuck me," he muttered, glaring blearily at the empty cafetière. "Fucking Sirius," he growled, taking down the coffee supplies, "and his fucking coffee snobbery." He conjured boiling water into a crystal pitcher and poured it into the cafetière. "Bastard Christ son of a bitch," he added thoughtfully.

"Good morning, Remus," Lily said.

"Shit," he said, turning to face her. "Hello. I refuse to call it good."

"That’s fair."

He nodded stiffly, then returned to making coffee. "Walking fuck up there doesn’t even drink it, you know. Wakes up at hell’s own hour and drinks demon piss tea." He wobbled over to the table and dropped his mug, which was decorated with smiling suns, rainbows, and balloons, onto it. He sipped the coffee, made a face, and applied a cooling charm to it. Then, in three gulps, it was gone.

"Sirius drinks coffee."

Remus glared at her. "Lord Black drinks espresso at cafes and tea at home. Just won’t have cheap shit instant coffee in the house because it looks bad to his three-week paramours."

"Eddie lasted a few months."

"Sweet Eddie was nineteen," Remus snarled. Groaning, he leaned forward and pressed his forehead to the table. "I have to get another job. I and my chronic bullshit body need to move out. Writing was a horrible idea, moving in again was a horrible idea, enhanced hearing was a horrible idea."

Lily patted his arm. "The book is great, but you might be right about the last two."

"Of course I’m right," he said seriously, turning his face towards her. "I have a supernatural ability to make bad choices and only realize years later."

"Somewhat related to that ability," she said slowly, watching his expression, "is now a good time to talk?"

"Only if you want me to be too distracted by my painful recovery to lie to you," he said brightly.

"See, I keep telling you you're the clever one. Want some breakfast?"

He grimaced. "No, thanks, too nauseous. This is about Severus?"

"Yes." She leaned back. "Well, to start, I love you. Nothing you do or don't do will ever change that. You're my best friend and one of my favorite people. If you do something I can't approve of, I might stop being your friend, but even so I will always make Wolfsbane for you. I would never turn anyone against you or otherwise punish you socially. I will never out you; I will never betray your confidences."

He nodded, eyes closed, cheek dragging against the wood of the table. "But?"

"If you ever cover for James and Sirius like that again, I'll demonstrate why I got along so well with Severus Snape."

Remus breathed in deeply and opened his amber eyes. "If it helps," he said drily, "almost killing Snape is the worst thing we've ever done. You're now up to date."

"It also would have killed you."

"I'm aware."

She frowned down at him. "That is a dreadful pun, Lupin."

"One must keep one's sense of humor, Evans."

She chewed on the inside of her cheek. "Did he spend the full moon with you, then, in the Shack?"

"Ah, he refused. Something about how I had cursed him and my Pack wanted him dead. Dumbledore set up alternate arrangements."

"That was when my crush started, you know," she said, squeezing Remus's arm. "James saved my weird, vindictive little friend even though they hated each other. I thought it was noble, and I was disgusted that Severus disagreed. He seemed absurd, spitting curses at his hero." She sighed, her shoulders curling inward. "How far back would we have to go to fix everything, do you think?"

"December 31, 1926. We steal baby You-Know-Who and teach him the value of life, love, and laughter. Then we pack him into a Muggle rocket and ship him to the moon."

"They didn't have rockets in 1926."

"We're time travelers, Lily. Obviously we would put him on that American one from '69. Fuck Armstrong; everybody look at this baby Dark Lord."

"I don't think he should get a whole moon."

"Fuck the moon," Remus said seriously. "They deserve each other."

"Merlin," Lily sighed. "My parents. Mary, Marlene, Dorcas, Peter. Regulus. The Boneses, the Prewetts. And I'm maudlin over him."

Remus reached out and took her hand. "You're allowed to miss people who treated you poorly; I'm allowed to forgive people who outed me. What we accept is up to us."

Breathing in and out, she formed words around the thing that had been crushing her for months, years maybe, the thing that had burrowed into her so deeply that she felt its weight in her bones. "I don't feel real like James is real," she whispered. "I'm not… I'm not anywhere he isn't. I'm his wife and the mother of his children, and I'm the prize at the end of the story of his seven-year pursuit, and I'm his 'best gal' at the office, and I don't know who I am." She crushed his hand in hers, not daring to look at him. "Am I crazy?"

Remus stood and pulled her into a hug. His hugs were her favorite, gentle, with just enough pressure. He was so tall that her face pressed into his chest, and his werewolf nature kept him warmer than simple humans. He almost always smelled like chocolate, but today he was coffee and dust and sweat.

"No," he said, kissing her hair, "not unless I am."

Lily was not crying, because she refused to cry in the basement of Grimmauld Place, yet Remus's scratchy shirt was wet. She pulled him closer. "What's wrong with us?"

"Well, we fell in love with charismatic assholes," he replied. "Only mine is a bit more of a bastard, but he's tall and fit and has a flying motorbike, so really I had no choice. I suppose James is alright, if you like the marrying type who notices, on occasion, that other people have feelings."

She pulled back and studied his face. "You truly do need to move out."

"As soon as possible," he agreed cheerfully, "or else I'll try to kill him right back. It's my turn, you see."


	4. Cycles

The sameness of the suburbs made her uneasy. As a child, she had believed the double-fronted red brick semi of Cokeworth to be the most beautiful building, much less house; then, hand clasped in Severus's, she had seen Hogwarts for the first time. After that, Cokeworth's very air could not compete, and she'd spent her breaks studying, experimenting, and dreaming of school.

Number four was a tidy thing, fastidiously normal. The growing things in the garden did not stray from the tight plan; she suspected that any red tulip in the pink plot met an early end.

Stiffening her spine, Lily strode forward. She had fought a war; she could face her sister.

She knocked sharply. Moments later, the curtain twitched; as Lily turned to face the motion, the door opened.

"Lily," Petunia gasped, eyes wide, face pale. "How did you--?" She darted a look around and then stole out of the house, shutting the door behind her. She was shaking.

"Tuney!" Lily searched her sister for injury, but Petunia seemed healthy. "What's wrong?"

"She's like you," Petunia said. "Vernon, he--my child, Lily, she's just a child--"

"It's alright," Lily said. "Start at the beginning."

"Diana. Diana is a witch."


End file.
